Startup #2 - Festack - Justin Rahardjo

Festack is the next startup on my 12 startups challenge. It is a list of different Canadian music festivals with its image and genre.

The idea

After going to a few music festivals, I realize that I quite enjoy going to the smaller festivals. Unfortunately, these festivals are a lot harder to find unless you have been invited to it, or per chance ran into their Facebook group. So I wanted to build a listing site that keeps track of these festivals.

Competitors and other options

There are other competitors in this space, primarily music festival wizards. This is a good sign as it means that there is a market for something like this. The issue I saw when looking at the other sites is that it generally focuses on large festivals and I wanted to find out about smaller, niche festivals.

They also do not have some information that I’d like to eventually gather. Primarily volunteering information as well as information for performers, e.g. When to apply etc.

What I built

This was built using the following stack:

Backend — With the amount of data, it is currently just a json file. This allowed me to push this out the door very quickly.
The frontend. Used a combination of Astro and Preact. This particular project would benefit from SEO so having a static site is a good idea.

How will this make money?

At this point, there is no specific business model for this yet. I am starting to collect emails on the site for those interested in getting more out of the list. I have some ideas floating around a performer application platform or advertising by these festivals, so I may get some more info once I can get enough traffic coming through this site.

How have I marketed this?

I am marketing this via a couple of channels:

Reddit, there are are a few subreddits around music festivals that I posted on
SEO, this is more of a long-term marketing strategy, but building up pages for each page will generate SEO for those that are searching for these festivals

Results

Unfortunately, as I launched this and then went travelling, I did not realize that analytics was not working properly until just last week. So only based on the last week, these are the results:

5 visitors/week
3 people provided feedback mentioning this would be useful to them

What’s next?

With SEO, this is a long-term project that will require more pages to keep it improving overtime. So I am also planning on either expanding the number of festivals or keeping the same amount but improving the data quality, e.g. Adding more data points to each of them. I will likely only have time/resources to do one or the other.

So that’s the 2nd one of the mark! What do you think? Is it something you would use? Any thoughts, comments and feedback is appreciated! Let me know at hello@justindra.com.